Manolis Kellis: Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything | Lex Fridman Podcast #142

Lex Fridman 0:00 The following is a conversation with Manolis Kellis, his fourth time on the podcast. He's a professor at MIT and head of the MIT Computational Biology Group. Since this is episode number 142, and 42, as we all know, is the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, according to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, we decided to talk about this unanswerable question of the meaning of life in whatever way we two descendants of apes could muster. From biology to psychology to metaphysics and to music. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode. Thanks to Grammarly, which is a service for checking spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and readability. Athletic Greens, the all-in-one drink that I start every day with to cover all my nutritional bases. And Cash App, the app I use to send money to friends. Please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the opening 40 minutes of the conversation are all about the many songs that formed the soundtrack to the journey of Manolis's life. It was a happy accident for me to discover yet another dimension of depth to the fascinating mind of Manolis. I include links to YouTube versions of many of the songs we mention in the description and overlay lyrics on occasion. But if you're just listening to this without listening to the songs or watching the video, I hope you still might enjoy, as I did, the passion that Manolis has for music, his singing of the little excerpts from the songs, and in general, the meaning we discuss that we pull from the different songs. If music is not your thing, I do give timestamps to the less musical and more philosophical parts of the conversation. I hope you enjoy this little experiment in conversation about music and life. If you do, please subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @LexFridman. And now, here's my conversation with Manolis Kellis.

Lex Fridman 2:18 You mentioned Leonard Cohen and the song Hallelujah as a beautiful song. So what are the three songs you draw the most meaning from about life?

Manolis Kellis 2:29 Don't get me started. So there's really countless songs that have marked me, that have sort of, uh, shaped me in periods of joy and in periods of sadness. Uh, my son likes to joke that I have a song for every sentence he will say-

Lex Fridman 2:44 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 2:44 ... 'cause very often, I will break into song with a sentence he'll say. (laughs) My wife calls me the radio 'cause I, I can sort of recite hundreds of songs, uh, that have really shaped me. So it's very, it's gonna be very hard to just pick a few, so I'm just gonna tell you a little bit about my song transition-

Lex Fridman 3:00 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 3:00 ... as I've grown up. In Greece, it was very much about, as I told you before, the misery-

Lex Fridman 3:05 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 3:05 ... the poverty, but also overcoming adversity. So some of the songs that I, that have really shaped me are, uh, Haris Alexiou, for example, is one of my favorite singers, uh, in Greece. And then, uh, there's also really just old traditional songs that my parents used to listen to, like one of them is (singing) , which is basically, "Oh, if I was rich." And the song is painting this beautiful picture about all the noises that you hear in the neighborhood, in his poor neighborhood. The train going by, the priest walking to the church, and the kids crying next door and all of that. And he says, "With all of that, I'm having trouble falling asleep and dreaming. If I was rich..." And then, he was like, you know, um, break into that, so it's this j- juxtaposition between the spirit and the sublime-

Lex Fridman 3:56 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 3:57 ... and then the physical and the harsh reality. It's just not having troubles, not-

Lex Fridman 4:01 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 4:02 ... not, not being miserable.

Lex Fridman 4:03 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 4:03 So basically, rich to him just means n- out of my misery, basically.

Lex Fridman 4:07 Yeah, yeah.

Manolis Kellis 4:08 Uh, (laughs) and then also being able to travel, being able to sort of be the captain of a ship and, you know, see the world and stuff like that. So it's just s- such beautiful imagery.

Lex Fridman 4:16 So many of the Greek songs, just like the poetry we talked about, they acknowledge the, the cruelty, the difficulty of life-

Manolis Kellis 4:22 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 4:22 ... but are longing for a better life.

Manolis Kellis 4:24 That's exactly right, and another one is (Greek) , and this is one of those songs that has, like, a fast and joyful half and a slow and sad half, and he goes back and forth between them. And he's like, (singing) . So poor, you know, basically, uh, it's the state of being poor, I don't, I don't even know if there's a word for that-

Lex Fridman 4:48 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 4:49 (laughs) ... in English. And then, fast part is (singing) . So and then, it's like, oh, you know, um, basically, p- like, the state of being poor and misery, uh, you know, for you, I write all my songs, et cetera. And then the fast part is, "In your arms grew up and suffered," and, you know, stood up and, you know, rose. Um, "Man with clear vision."

Lex Fridman 5:18 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 5:18 This whole concept of taking on the world with nothing to lose because you've seen the worst of it. This imagery of (singing) . So it's describing the young men as cyprus trees.

Lex Fridman 5:33 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 5:34 And that's probably one of my earliest exposure to a metaphor, to sort of, you know, this very rich imagery. And I love about the fact that I was reading a story to my kids the other day and it was dark, and my daughter, who's six, is like, "Oh, can I please see the pictures?" And Jonathan, who's, um, eight, so, so my daughter Cleo, uh, is like, "Oh, let's look at the pictures." And, and my son Jonathan, he's like, "But, but Cleo, if you look at the pictures, it's just an image. If you just close your eyes and listen, it's a video."

Lex Fridman 6:03 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 6:04 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 6:04 That's brilliant.

Manolis Kellis 6:05 It's beautiful.

Lex Fridman 6:06 Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Manolis Kellis 6:06 And he's basically showing just how much more the human imagination has-

Lex Fridman 6:10 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 6:10 ... besides just a few images that, you know, the book will give you. And then another one, oh, gosh, this one is really, like, miserable. It's... (laughs)

Lex Fridman 6:18 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 6:20 It's called Stoperigali Tokrifo, uh, and it's basically describing how, uh, vigorously we took on our life, and we pushed hard towards a direction that we then realized was the wrong one. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 6:35 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 6:37 And it, it... Again, these songs give you so much perspective. There's no songs like that in English-

Lex Fridman 6:41 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 6:41 ... that will basically, you know, sort of just smack you in the face-

Lex Fridman 6:44 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 6:44 ... about sort of the passion and the force and the drive, and then it turns out, ah, we just followed the wrong life.

Lex Fridman 6:50 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 6:51 And it's like, "Whoa." (laughs)

Lex Fridman 6:54 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 6:54 So... (laughs)

Lex Fridman 6:54 Okay, so that was your-

Manolis Kellis 6:55 All right, so that, that's like before 12.

Lex Fridman 6:57 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 6:57 So, so, you know, uh, growing up in sort of this horrendously miserable, you know, sort of view of romanticism of, you know, suffering. Um, so then my preteen years is like, you know, learning English through songs, so basically, you know, listening to all the American pop songs and then memorizing them vocally-

Lex Fridman 7:17 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 7:18 ... before I even knew what they meant. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 7:20 (laughs) Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 7:21 So, you know, Madonna and Michael Jackson and all of these sort of really popular songs, and, you know, George Michael and... Uh, just songs that I would just listen to the radio and repeat vocally.

Lex Fridman 7:30 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 7:30 And eventually as I started learning English, I was like, "Oh, wow, this thing I've been repeating, I no, I now understand what it means," without re-listening to it-

Lex Fridman 7:37 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 7:37 ... but just with re-repeating it. I was like, "Oh." (laughs) Again, Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror-

Lex Fridman 7:43 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 7:44 ... is, uh, teaching you that it's your responsibility to, to just improve yourself, you know? If you wanna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change, this whole concept of... Again, I mean, all of these songs, you can listen to them shallowly, or you can just listen to them and say, "Oh, there's deeper meaning here." And I think there's a certain philosophy of, of song as a way of touching the psyche. So if you look at regions of the brain, people who have lost their language ability because they have an accident in that region of the brain can actually sing-

Lex Fridman 8:14 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 8:14 ... because it's exactly the symmetric region of the brain.

Lex Fridman 8:18 Wow.

Manolis Kellis 8:18 And that, again, teaches you so much about language evolution and sort of the, the duality of musicality and, you know, rhythmic patterns and eventually language.

Lex Fridman 8:31 Do you have a sense of why songs developed? So you're kind of suggesting that it's possible that there is something important about our connection with song and with music on the level of the importance of language. Is it possible that that, that-

Manolis Kellis 8:47 It's not just possible. In my view, language comes after music. Language comes after song.

Lex Fridman 8:52 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 8:52 No, seriously. Like basically-

Lex Fridman 8:53 That would be fascinating to me.

Manolis Kellis 8:54 ... my view of human cognitive evolution-

Lex Fridman 8:56 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 8:56 ... is rituals. If you look at many early cultures, there's rituals around every stage of life. There's organized dance performances around mating.

Lex Fridman 9:09 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 9:10 And if you look at mate selection, I mean, that's an evolutionary drive right there. So basically, if you're not able to string together a complex dance as a bird, you don't get a mate. And that actually forms this development for many song-learning birds. Not every bird knows how to sing and not every bird knows how to learn a s- a complicated song. So basically, there's birds that simply have the same few tunes that they know how to play, and then a lot of that is inherent and genetically encoded, and others are birds that learn how to sing. And the... You know, if you look at a lot of these exotic birds of paradise and stuff like that, like, the mating rituals they have are enormously amazing. And I think human mating rituals of, you know, ancient tribes are not very far off from that. And in my view, the sequential formation of these movements is a prelude to the cognitive capabilities that ultimately enable language.

Lex Fridman 10:07 (laughs) It is fascinating to think that that's, uh, not just an accidental precursor to intelligence-

Manolis Kellis 10:13 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 10:13 ... it's, uh-

Manolis Kellis 10:14 Sexually selected.

Lex Fridman 10:15 It's... Well, it's sexually selected and it, and it's a prerequisite.

Manolis Kellis 10:19 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 10:19 It's like-

Manolis Kellis 10:20 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 10:20 ... it's required-

Manolis Kellis 10:21 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 10:21 ... for intelligence.

Manolis Kellis 10:21 And, and even as language has now developed, I think the artistic expression is needed, like badly needed by our brain. So it's not just that, oh, our brain can kind of, you know, take a break and go do that stuff. No. I mean, you know, uh, I don't know if you remember that scene from... Oh gosh, what's that Jack- Jack Nicholson movie in New Hampshire? Uh, all, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy?

Lex Fridman 10:47 (laughs) A dull boy?

Manolis Kellis 10:48 Uh...

Lex Fridman 10:49 The Shining.

Manolis Kellis 10:49 The Shining. (laughs) So-

Lex Fridman 10:51 That's a good movie.

Manolis Kellis 10:52 ... there's this amazing scene where he's constantly trying to, to concentrate, and what, what's coming out of the typewriter is just gibberish.

Lex Fridman 10:58 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 10:59 And I have that image as well when I'm, when I'm working, and I'm like, "No, basically all of these crazy, you know, huge number of hobbies that I have, they're not just tolerated by my work, they're required by my work." This ability of sort of stretching your brain in all these different directions is connecting your emotional self and your cognitive self, and that's a prerequisite to being able to be cognitively capable, at least in my view.

Lex Fridman 11:25 Yeah, I wonder if the world without art and music... You're just making me realize that perhaps that world would be not just devoid of fun things to look at or listen to, but devoid of all the other stuff, all the bridges and rockets and science and-

Manolis Kellis 11:41 Exactly, exactly.

Lex Fridman 11:42 ... all those types of aspects.

Manolis Kellis 11:42 Creativity is not disconnected from art. And, you know, my kids, I mean, you know, I could be doing the full math treatment to them. No. They play the piano and they play the violin and they play sports. I mean, this whole m- you know, sort of movement and going through mazes and playing tennis and, you know, playing soccer and avoiding obstacles and all of that, that forms your three-dimensional view of the world, being able to actually move and run and play in three dimensions.... is extremely important for math, for, you know, stringing together complicated concepts. It's the same underlying cognitive machinery that is used for navigating mazes and for navigating theorems-

Lex Fridman 12:27 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 12:27 ... and sort of solving equations. So I can't, you know, I can't have a conversation with my students without, you know, sort of either using my hands or opening the whiteboard in Zoom and just constantly drawing, or, you know, back when we had in-person meetings, just the whiteboard in my office.

Lex Fridman 12:45 Ah, the whiteboard, yeah. That, that's fascinating to think about. Uh, so that's Michael Jackson, man.

Manolis Kellis 12:49 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 12:49 The mirror of Careless Whisper with George Michael, which is a song I like, but you didn't say-

Manolis Kellis 12:53 Is the Careless Whisper, I mean, I-

Lex Fridman 12:54 ... Careless Whisper. You didn't say that. I like that one. That's, you know-

Manolis Kellis 12:57 I had recorded-

Lex Fridman 12:58 ... too popular for you?

Manolis Kellis 12:58 I had recorded... No, no, no. That, it's an amazing song for me. I had recorded a small part of it as it played at the tail end of the radio.

Lex Fridman 13:05 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 13:05 And I had a tape where I only had part of that song.

Lex Fridman 13:08 Just part of that song? You just sang it over and over.

Manolis Kellis 13:09 And I just played it over and over and over again.

Lex Fridman 13:11 (laughs) Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 13:11 Just so beautiful.

Lex Fridman 13:13 It's so heartbreaking. There's-

Manolis Kellis 13:14 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 13:15 That song is almost Greek, it's so heartbreaking. (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 13:17 I know. And George Michael is Greek.

Lex Fridman 13:19 Is he Greek?

Manolis Kellis 13:19 He's Greek, of course.

Lex Fridman 13:20 He's... No.

Manolis Kellis 13:20 George Michaelidís.

Lex Fridman 13:21 That's right.

Manolis Kellis 13:22 I mean, he's Greek.

Lex Fridman 13:22 Yeah. (laughs) Did not know this.

Manolis Kellis 13:24 (laughs) Now you know. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 13:25 I'm, uh, so sorry to, to offend you so deeply not knowing this. So, okay, so what's-

Manolis Kellis 13:30 So anyway, so we're moving to France when I'm 12 years old. And now I'm getting into the songs of Gainsbourg. So, Gainsbourg is this incredible French composer. He is always seen on stage, like not even pretending to try to please, just like with his cigarette, just like r-r-r-r mumbling his songs. But the lyrics are unbelievable. Like basically entire sentences will rhyme. He will say the same thing twice and you're like, "Whoa." (laughs) And in fact, another, speaking of Greek, uh, a French Greek, Georges Moustaki. This song is just magnificent. "Avec ma gueule de métèque, de juif errant, de pâtre grec." So, "With my, um, face of..." Métèque is actually a Greek word. It's, uh, you know, it's a French word for a Greek word. But mét mean- comes from meta, and then èque from oikia, from ecology, which means home. So métèque is someone who has changed homes, so a migrant. So with my face of a migrant. And, and you'll love this one. "De juif errant, de pâtre grec." Of, uh, meandering Jew-

Lex Fridman 14:34 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 14:35 ... of Greek pastor. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 14:39 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 14:39 So again, you know, the Russian, Greek-

Lex Fridman 14:41 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 14:41 ... you know, Jew, Orthodox connection. So, uh, "Et mes cheveux aux quatre vents." With my hair in the four winds. "Avec mes yeux tout délavés qui me donnent l'air de rêver." Avec, "With my eyes that are all washed out, who give me the pretense of dreaming, but who don't dream that much anymore. With my hands of thief, of musician, and who have, uh, stolen so many gardens. With my mouth that has drunk, that has kissed, and that has bitten without ever pleasing its hunger."

Lex Fridman 15:17 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 15:18 "With my, um, skin that has been rubbed in the sun of all the summers, and anything that was wearing a skirt."

Lex Fridman 15:28 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 15:29 "With my heart..." And then you have to listen to this verse, it's so beautiful. "Avec mon coeur qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert." With my heart that knew how to make suffer as much as it suffered, but was able to... That knew how to make, in French is actually "su faire." That knew how to make.

Lex Fridman 15:54 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 15:54 "Qui a su faire souffrir autant qu'il a souffert." I mean, just verses that span the whole thing. It's just beautiful. So-

Lex Fridman 16:00 Do you know, uh-

Manolis Kellis 16:01 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 16:01 ... on a small tangent, do you know Ja- uh, Jacques Brel?

Manolis Kellis 16:05 Of course, of course.

Lex Fridman 16:06 And then, uh-

Manolis Kellis 16:07 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 16:07 ... Ne Me Quittez Pas?

Manolis Kellis 16:08 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 16:08 You know those songs? Those, that song gets me every time, the...

Manolis Kellis 16:12 So there's a cover of that song by one of my favorite female artists.

Lex Fridman 16:17 Not Nina Simone?

Manolis Kellis 16:18 No, no, no, no, no.

Lex Fridman 16:19 Modern?

Manolis Kellis 16:20 Caro Emerald.

Lex Fridman 16:21 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 16:21 She's, um, from Amsterdam. And, uh, she, she has a version of Ne Me Quittez Pas where she's actually added some English lyrics.

Lex Fridman 16:30 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 16:31 And it's, it's really beautiful. But again, Ne Me Quittez Pas is just so, I mean, it's, you know, the promises.

Lex Fridman 16:37 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 16:38 The volcanoes that, you know, will restart.

Lex Fridman 16:41 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 16:42 It's just so beautiful. And, uh-

Lex Fridman 16:43 That, I love so... There's not many songs that so sh- show such depth of desperation for another-

Manolis Kellis 16:52 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 16:52 ... human being. That, that's so powerful. Unapologet-

Manolis Kellis 16:54 (sings in French)

Lex Fridman 16:55 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 16:56 (sings in French) . And then high school, now I'm starting to learn English.

Lex Fridman 17:03 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 17:03 So I moved to New York. So Sting's Englishman in New York.

Lex Fridman 17:07 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 17:08 Magnificent song. And again, there's, "If manners maketh manners, someone said. Then he's the hero of the day. It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile. Be yourself, no matter what they say." And then, uh, "Takes more than combat gear to make a man. Takes more than a license for a gun. Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can. A gentleman will walk but never run." It's, it, again, you're talking about songs that teach you how to live.

Lex Fridman 17:41 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 17:41 I mean, this is one of them. Basically says, it's not the combat gear that makes a man. Where's the part where he says, uh, there we go. "Gentle, uh, gentleness, sobriety are rare in this society. At night, a candle is brighter than the sun." Just so beautiful.

Lex Fridman 17:57 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 17:57 He basically says, well, you just might be the only one. "Uh, modesty, propriety can lead to notoriety. (laughs) You could end up as the only one." It's, um, it basically tells you, you don't have to be like the others. Be yourself, show kindness, show generosity. Don't, you know, don't let that anger get to you.You know the song Fragile? How fragile we are, how fragile we are. So again, as, in Greece, I didn't even know what that meant, how fragile we are, but it, the song was so beautiful. And then eventually, I learned English and I actually understand the lyrics. And the song is actually written after the Contras murdered Ben Linder in 1987. And the US eventually turned against supporting these guerrillas, and it was just a political song, but such a realization that you can't win with violence, basically. And that song starts with the most beautiful poetry. So, "If blood will flow, when flesh and steel are one, drying in the color of the evening sun. Tomorrow's rain will wash the stains away, but something in our minds will always stay. Perhaps this final act was meant to clinch a lifetime's argument that nothing comes from violence, and nothing ever could. For all those born beneath an angry star, lest we forget how fragile we are."

Lex Fridman 19:28 Damn.

Manolis Kellis 19:29 Damn, right?

Lex Fridman 19:31 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 19:31 I mean, that's poetry-

Lex Fridman 19:32 That's poetry, yeah.

Manolis Kellis 19:33 ... at its most beautiful. And he's using the English language in just such a refined way, with deep meanings, but also words that rhyme just so beautifully, and evocations of when flesh and steel are one. I mean, it's just mind-boggling.

Lex Fridman 19:53 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 19:53 And then, of course, the refrain that everybody remembers is, "On and on, the rain will fall," etc. But like this beginning-

Lex Fridman 20:01 Tears from a star, wow.

Manolis Kellis 20:02 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 20:02 (laughs) What a line.

Manolis Kellis 20:03 And again, "tears from a star, how fragile we are." I mean, just these rhymes are just flowing so naturally.

Lex Fridman 20:09 There's something, it's, it seems that more meaning comes when there's a rhythm, that, uh-

Manolis Kellis 20:14 Of course.

Lex Fridman 20:14 ... I don't know what-

Manolis Kellis 20:15 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 20:15 ... what that is. That probably connects to exactly what you were saying.

Manolis Kellis 20:18 And if you pay close attention, you will notice that the more obvious words sometimes are the second verse.

Lex Fridman 20:24 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 20:25 And the less obvious are often the first verse, because it makes the second verse flow much more naturally, because otherwise it feels contrived. Oh, you went and found this like unusual word.

Lex Fridman 20:35 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 20:36 In dark moments, uh, the whole album of Pink Floyd and the movie just marked me enormously-

Lex Fridman 20:42 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 20:42 ... as a, as a teenager, just The Wall. Um, and there's one song that never actually made it into the album, that's only there in the movie-

Lex Fridman 20:49 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 20:49 ... about when the tigers broke free, and the tigers are the tanks of the Germans. And, um, it just describes again this vivid imagery. It was just before dawn, one miserable morning in black 44, when the forward commander was told to sit tight when he asked that his men be withdrawn. And the generals gave thanks as the other ranks held back the enemy tanks for a while. And the Anzio bridgehead was held for the price of a few hundred ordinary lives. So that's a theme that keeps coming back in Pink Floyd with us versus them. Mm-hmm. "Us and them, God only knows that's not what we would choose to do. Forward he cried from the rear, and the front rows died," from another song. It's like this whole concept of us versus them, and there's that theme of us versus them again, where the child is discovering how his father died when he finds an old... "And I found it one day in a drawer of old photographs hidden away. And my eyes still grow damp to remember His Majesty signed with his own rubber stamp." So, it's so ironic because it seems, the way that he's writing it, that he's not crying because his father was lost. He's crying because kind, old King George took the time to actually write Mother a note about the fact that his father died.

Lex Fridman 22:19 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 22:20 It's so ironic because he basically says, "We are just ordinary men, and of course we're disposable." So, I don't know if you know the root of the word pioneers.

Lex Fridman 22:30 No.

Manolis Kellis 22:31 But you had a chessboard here earlier. A pawn, in French it's pion.

Lex Fridman 22:36 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 22:37 They are the ones that you send to the front to get murdered, slaughtered. This whole concept of pioneers-

Lex Fridman 22:42 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 22:42 ... having taken these whole disposable ordinary men to actually be the ones that, you know, we're now treating as heroes. So anyway, there's this juxtaposition of that. And then the part that always just strikes me is the music, and the tonality totally changes. And now he describes the attack. "It was dark all around, there was frost in the ground, when the tigers broke free. And no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers Company Z. They were all left behind, most of them dead, the rest of them dying. And that's how the High Command took my daddy from me." And that song, even though it's not in the album, explains the whole movie.

Lex Fridman 23:29 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 23:30 Because it's this movie of misery. It's this movie of someone being stuck in their head and not being able to get out of it. There's no other movie that I think has captured so well this prison that is someone's own mind, and this wall that you're stuck inside, and this, you know, feeling of loneliness, and sort of, "Is there anybody out there?"

Lex Fridman 23:53 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 23:53 Uh, and you know, sort of, "Hello? Hello? Is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anyone home? Come on. Yo. I hear you're feeling down."

Lex Fridman 24:09 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 24:10 Just want to

Lex Fridman 24:11 (sings)

Manolis Kellis 24:11 (sings) Again. Anyway, so...

Lex Fridman 24:16 Yeah, the prison of your mind. So those are-

Manolis Kellis 24:18 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 24:18 ... the darker moments for you.

Manolis Kellis 24:19 Exactly, these are the darker moments.

Lex Fridman 24:22 Yeah, it's, in the darker moments, the mind does feel...

24:25 Like you're, you're trapped in, alone in a room with it.

Manolis Kellis 24:30 Yeah. And there's this, this scene in the movie which, like, where he just breaks out with his guitar, and there's this prostitute in the room. He starts throwing stuff, and then he, like, you know, breaks the window. He throws the chair outside, and then you see him laying in the pool-

Lex Fridman 24:43 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 24:43 ... with his own blood, like, you know, everywhere. And then there's these endless hours spent fixing every little thing and lining it up. And it's this whole sort of mania versus, you know, you can spend hours building up something and just destroy it in a few seconds. One of My Turns is that song. And it's like, "I feel cold as a tourniquet, right as ; (mumbling) dry as a funeral drum." And then the music builds up saying, "Run to the bedroom, there's a suitcase on the left, there you'll find my favorite ax. Don't look so frightened, this is just a passing phase, one of my bad days." It's just so beautiful.

Lex Fridman 25:31 I need to re-watch this. That's so-

Manolis Kellis 25:33 It's just great. But imagine watching-

Lex Fridman 25:34 You're, you make me realize how-

Manolis Kellis 25:34 ... this as a teenager.

Lex Fridman 25:35 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Manolis Kellis 25:35 It, like, ruins your mind.

Lex Fridman 25:38 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 25:39 It, like so many, such, such harsh imagery. And then, um, you know, anyway, so, so there's the dark moment. And then again, going back to Sting-

Lex Fridman 25:48 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 25:48 ... now it's the political songs, Russians. And I think that song should be a, a, a new national anthem for the US. Not for Russians, but for red versus blue. "Mr. Khrushchev says we will bury you. I don't subscribe to this point of view. It'd be such an ignorant thing to do, if the Russians love their children too." What is it doing? It's basically saying, "The Russians are just as humans as we are. There's no way that they're gonna let their children die." And then it, it, it's just so beautiful. "How can I save my innocent boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?" And now that's the n- new national anthem are you reading?

Lex Fridman 26:37 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 26:37 "There is no monopoly of common sense, on either side of the political fence. We share the same biology, regardless of ideology. Believe me when I say to you, I hope the Russians love their children too. There's no such thing as a winnable war. It's a lie we don't believe anymore." I mean, it's beautiful, right? And for God's sake, America, wake up.

Lex Fridman 27:13 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 27:13 These are your fellow Americans. They're your, your fellow biology. You know, there is no monopoly of common sense on either side of the political fence. It's just so beautiful.

Lex Fridman 27:24 There's no crisper, simpler way to say-

Manolis Kellis 27:27 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 27:27 ... "Russians love their children too."

Manolis Kellis 27:29 Yeah. Yeah.

Lex Fridman 27:29 The, the, the common humanity.

Manolis Kellis 27:31 Yeah. And remember the, what I was telling you, I think in one of our first podcasts, about the, the daughter who's crying for her hus- for, for her brother to come back from war, and then the Virgin Mary appears and says, "Who should I take instead? This Turk, here's his family, here's his children. This other one, he just got married." Et cetera. And that basically says, no, I mean, if you look at the Lord of the Rings-

Lex Fridman 27:55 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 27:56 ... the enemies are these monsters. They're not human. And that's what we always do. We always say, "They, you know, they're not like us. They're different. They're not humans." Et cetera. So there's this dehumanization that has to happen for people to go to war. Y- you know, if you realize just how close we are genetically, one with the other, this whole 99.9% identical, you can't bear weapons against someone who's like that.

Lex Fridman 28:22 And the things that are the most meaningful to us in our li- lives, at every level, is the same, on all sides.

Manolis Kellis 28:28 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 28:28 On both sides.

Manolis Kellis 28:29 Exactly.

Lex Fridman 28:30 So not just that we're genetically the same.

Manolis Kellis 28:32 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 28:33 We, uh-

Manolis Kellis 28:33 We're ideologically the same. We love our children, we love our country. We will, you know, we will fight for our family.

Lex Fridman 28:40 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 28:40 So, and the last one I mentioned last time we spoke, which is Joni Mitchell's-

Lex Fridman 28:45 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 28:45 ... Both Sides Now. So, uh, she, she has three rounds, one on clouds, one on love, and one on life. And on cloud she says. "Rows and flows of angel hair, and ice cream castles in the air, and feathered canyons everywhere, I've looked at clouds that way. But now they only block the sun, they rain and snow on everyone. So many things I would have done, but clouds got in my way. And then I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow it's cloud illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all." And then she goes on about love, how it's super, super happy, or it's about misery and loss, and about life, how it's about winning and losing, and so on and so forth. "But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads, they say I've changed. Well something's lost and something's gained, in living every day." So again, that's growing up and realizing that, well, the view that you had as a kid is not necessarily the view you have as an adult. Remember my poem from when I was 16 years old, of this whole, you know, "Children dance now all in a row. And then in the end, even though the snow seems bright, without you have lost their light. Sun that sang and moon that smiled." So this whole concept of if you have love, and if you have passion, you see the exact same thing from a different way.

Lex Fridman 30:26 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 30:26 You can go out running in the rain, or you could just stay in and say, "Ugh, it sucks. I want to be able to go outside now."

Lex Fridman 30:33 ... both sides.

Manolis Kellis 30:34 Anyway, and the last one is, last, last one, I promise. L- Leonard Cohen.

Lex Fridman 30:38 This is amazing, by the way. You're...

Manolis Kellis 30:40 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 30:40 I'm s- I'm so glad we stumbled on how much, how much joy you have in so many avenues of life. And music is just one of them. That's amazing. But, yes, Leonard Cohen.

Manolis Kellis 30:52 Going back to Leonard Cohen, since that's where you started. So, uh, Leonard Cohen's Dance Me To The End Of Love, that's what-

Lex Fridman 30:56 Oh, yeah.

Manolis Kellis 30:57 ... that w- that w- that was our opening song in our wedding with my wife.

Lex Fridman 30:59 Oh, no. That's good.

Manolis Kellis 31:00 As we came out to greet the guests, it was Dance Me To The End Of Love.

Lex Fridman 31:03 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 31:03 And then another one-

Lex Fridman 31:04 That's good.

Manolis Kellis 31:04 ... which is just so passionate always, and we always keep referring back to it is, uh, I'm Your Man.

Lex Fridman 31:09 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 31:09 And it goes on and on about, sort of, I can be every type of lover for you.

Lex Fridman 31:14 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 31:14 And what's really beautiful in marriage is that we live that with my, with my wife every day. You can have the passion, you can have the anger, you can have the love, you can have the tenderness. There's just so many gems in that song. << If you want a partner, take my hand. Or if you want to strike me down in anger, here I stand, I'm your man. Then if you want a boxer, I will step into the ring for you. If you want a driver, climb inside. Or if you want to take me for a ride, you know you can. >> So this whole concept of, "You want to drive? I'll follow. You want me to drive? I'll drive." Um...

Lex Fridman 31:56 And the difference, I would say, between like that and Ne me quitte pas is, this song, he's got an attitude. He's like, um, he's proud of this, his ability to basically be any kind of man for the one he loves-

Manolis Kellis 32:08 Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Lex Fridman 32:08 ... as opposed to the Jacques Brel, like, desperation of, "What do I have to be for you to love me?"

Manolis Kellis 32:16 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 32:16 That kind of desperation.

Manolis Kellis 32:17 But, but, but notice, there's a parallel here. There's a verse that is perhaps not paid attention to s- as much, which says, "Ah, but a man never got a woman back. Not by begging on his knees." So it seems that the I'm Your Man is actually an apology song, in the same way that Ne me quitte pas is an apology song.

Lex Fridman 32:40 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 32:40 Ne me quitte pas basically says, "I've..."

Lex Fridman 32:43 Screwed up. (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 32:44 ... "I've screwed up."

Lex Fridman 32:45 (laughs) I'm sorry, baby. (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 32:45 And in the same way that the Careless Whisper is, "I screwed up."

Lex Fridman 32:49 Yes. That's right.

Manolis Kellis 32:50 << I'm never gonna dance again. Guilty feet have got no rhythm. >>

Lex Fridman 32:56 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 32:56 Um, so, so this is an apology song. << Not by begging on his knees or I'd crawl to you, baby and I'd fall at your feet and I'd howl at your beauty like a dog in heat. And I'd claw at your heart and I'd tear at your sheet. I'd say please. >> And then, um, the, the last one is so beautiful. << If you want a father for your child or only want to walk with me a while across the sand, I'm your man. >> That's the l- the last l- verses, which basically says, "You want me for a day? I'll be there. Do you want me just for walk? I'll be there. You want me for life? Do you want a father for your child? I'll be there too." It's just so beautiful. Oh, oh, oh, sorry. Remember how I told you I was gonna finish with a light-hearted song?

Lex Fridman 33:47 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 33:47 Ah. Last one.

Lex Fridman 33:48 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 33:49 You ready? So-

Lex Fridman 33:50 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 33:50 ... um, Alison Krauss and Union Station, country song, believe it or not, The Lucky One. So, I- I've never identified as much with the, uh, lyrics of a song (laughs) -

Lex Fridman 34:04 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 34:04 ... as this one. And it's hilarious. My friend, Serafim Batzoglou, uh, is the guy who got me into genomics in the first place. I owe enormously to him. And he's another Greek. We actually met dancing, believe it or not, so we used to perform Greek dances. Uh, I was the president of the International Students Association, so we put on these big performances for 500 people at MIT. And, uh, there's a picture on the MIT Tech where Serafim, who's like, you know, bodybuilder-

Lex Fridman 34:29 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 34:29 ... was holding me on his shoulder, and I was like, like doing maneuvers in the air basically.

Lex Fridman 34:33 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 34:34 Um, so anyway, this guy, Serafim, um, we were driving back from, um, a conference, and there's this Russian girl who was describing how every member of her family had been either killed by the communists or killed by the Germans or killed by the... (laughs) Like, she had just like, you know, misery. Like, death and, you know, sickness and everything. Everyone was decimated in her family. She was the last standing member. And we stop at a... Serafim was driving, and we stop at a, at a rest area, and he, he, he takes me aside, and he's like, "Manolis, we're gonna crash." (laughs)

Lex Fridman 35:08 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 35:08 "Get her out of my car." (laughs) And then he basically says, "But, but, but I'm only reassured because you're here with me."

Lex Fridman 35:14 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 35:15 And I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, he, you know, he's like, "From your smile, I know you're the luckiest man on the planet." (laughs)

Lex Fridman 35:22 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 35:22 So-

Lex Fridman 35:23 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 35:23 ... there's this really funny thing where I just feel freaking lucky all the time. And it's an, it's a question of attitude. Of course I'm not any luckier than any other person, but every time es- something horrible happens to me, I'm like... And in fact, even in that song, the, the song about sort of, you know, walking on the beach and this, you know, sort of taking our r- life the wrong way, and then, you know, having to turn around. At some point, he's like, you know, "In the fresh sand, we wrote her name. Οραία που φύσηξε ο βα... " Uh, so, so how nicely that the wind blew and the writing was erased. So again, it's this whole sort of, not just saying, "Oh, bummer."

Lex Fridman 36:03 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 36:04 But, "Oh, great, I just lost this. This must mean something." (laughs) Right? And then saying-

Lex Fridman 36:10 This horrible thing happened, it must open, uh, the door to a-

Manolis Kellis 36:13 Exactly, a new door.

Lex Fridman 36:14 ... to a beautiful chapter.

Manolis Kellis 36:15 So, so Alison Krauss is talking about The Lucky One. So I was like, "Oh my God, she wrote a song for me." (laughs) And she goes, << You're the lucky one I know that now. As free as the wind blowing down the road. Loved by many, hated by none. I'd say you were lucky 'cause you know what you've done. Not a care in the world or another worry in sight. >> (sings) Everything's gonna be all right 'cause you're the lucky one.

Lex Fridman 36:39 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 36:39 And then she goes, uh, (sings) "You're the lucky one, always having fun. A jack of all trades, a master of none. You look at the world with a smiling eyes and laugh at the devil as his train rolls by. I'll give you a song and a one-night stand. You'll be looking at a l- happy man 'cause you're the lucky one." It basically says, if you just don't worry too much, if you don't try to be, you know, a one wh- a one-trick pony, if you just embrace the fact that you might suck at a bunch of things, but you're just gonna try a lot of things. And then there's another verse that says, um... (sings) Well, you're blessed, I guess. But never knowing which road you're choosing. To you, the next best thing to playing and winning is playing and losing. It's just so beautiful.

Lex Fridman 37:26 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 37:27 Because he basically says, "If you try your best but it's still playing, if you lose, it's okay, you had an awesome game." And, um, again, superficially, it sounds like a super happy song. But then there's, uh, the last verse basically says... (sings) No matter where you are, that's where you'll be. You can bet your luck won't follow me. Just give you a song and a one-night stand. You'll be looking at a happy man. And in the video of the song, she just walks away or he just walks away or something like that. And it basically tells you that freedom comes at a price. Freedom comes at the price of non-commitment. This whole sort of birds who love and birds who cry, you can't really love unless you cry. You can't just be the lucky one, the happy boy, la la la, and yet have a long-term relationship.

Lex Fridman 38:18 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 38:19 So, it's, you know, on one hand I identify with the shallowness of this song, of, you know, "You're the lucky one, jack of all trades, master of none." But at the same time, I identify with the lesson of, well, you can't just be the happy, merry-go-lucky all the time. Sometimes you have to embrace loss. And sometimes you have to embrace suffering. And sometimes you have to embrace that if you have a safety net, you're not really committing enough. You're not, you know, basically, you're allowing yourself to slip. But if you just go all in and you just, you know, let go of your reservations, that's when you truly will get somewhere. So anyway, that's like the, the ... I managed to narrow it down to what, 15 songs? (laughs)

Lex Fridman 39:02 (laughs) Thank you for that wonderful journey that you just took us on. The, the, the (laughs) the darkest possible places of Greek song to, uh, to ending on this, a country song. I haven't heard it before, but, uh, that's exactly right, I feel the same way. Depending, depending on the day, is this, the luckiest human on Earth. And there's some- there's something to that. But you're right. It, it needs to be ... We need to now return to the muck of life in order to be able to, to, um, to truly enjoy it. That's, it's-

Manolis Kellis 39:37 What do you mean, muck? What's muck?

Lex Fridman 39:39 Uh, the messiness of life.

Manolis Kellis 39:41 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 39:41 The things that we're ... Things don't turn out the way you expect it to.

Manolis Kellis 39:46 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 39:46 The way ... So like, to feel lucky is like focusing on the, on the beautiful consequences.

Manolis Kellis 39:51 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 39:52 But then that feeling of things being different than you expected, that, uh-

Manolis Kellis 39:58 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 39:58 ... you stumble and all the kinds of ways, that, that seems to be it needs to be paired with the feeling of luck.

Manolis Kellis 40:03 There's basically one way, the only way not to make mistakes is to never do anything.

Lex Fridman 40:07 Right.

Manolis Kellis 40:09 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 40:09 Good. Well put.

Manolis Kellis 40:10 Basically, you have to embrace the fact that you'll be wrong so many times. In so many research meetings, I just go off on a tangent and I say, "Let's think about this for a second." And it's just crazy for me who's a computer scientist to just tell my biologist friends, "What if biology kind of worked this way?"

Lex Fridman 40:26 (laughs) Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 40:27 And they humor me, they just let me talk.

Lex Fridman 40:29 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 40:30 And rarely has it not gone somewhere good. It's not that I'm always right, but it's always something worth exploring further. That if you're an outsider with humility, and knowing that I'll be wrong a bunch of times, but I'll challenge your assumptions, you know, and often take us to a better place, is part of this whole sort of messiness of life. Like, if you don't try and lose and get hurt and suffer and cry and just break your heart, and all these feelings of guilt and, you know, "Wow, I did the wrong thing," of course that's part of life. And that's just something that, you know, i- if you are the, a doer, you'll make mistakes. If you're a criticizer, yeah, sure, you can st- sit back and criticize everybody else for their mistakes they make. Or instead, you can just be out there making those mistakes. And frankly, I'd rather be the criticized one than the criticizer.

Lex Fridman 41:27 Oh, brilliantly put. Not the critic.

Manolis Kellis 41:29 Every time somebody steals my bicycle I say, "Well ..."

Lex Fridman 41:31 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 41:31 I know, my son's like, "Why do they steal our bicycle, Dad?" And I'm like, "Aren't, aren't you happy that you have bicycles that people can steal?"

Lex Fridman 41:38 Steal. (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 41:38 (laughs) I'd rather be the person stolen from than the stealer.

Lex Fridman 41:41 Yeah, yeah.

Manolis Kellis 41:43 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 41:43 It's not the critic that counts.

Manolis Kellis 41:44 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 41:45 So, that's, we've just talked amazingly about life from the music perspective.

Lex Fridman 41:51 Let's, uh, talk about life from, human life from perhaps other perspective and its meaning. So this is episode 142. Uh, there is perhaps, uh, an ab- absurdly, uh, deep meaning to the number 42 that, uh, the, our culture has, has elevated, so this is a perfect time to talk about the meaning of life. We've talked about it already, but do you think this question that's so simple and so seemingly absurd has value, of what is the meaning of life? Is it something that raising the question and trying to answer it, is that a ridiculous pursuit, or is there some value? Is it answerable at all?

Manolis Kellis 42:39 So first of all, I, I feel like we owe it to your listeners to say, "Why 42?"

Lex Fridman 42:44 Sure.

Manolis Kellis 42:44 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 42:46 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 42:46 So first of all, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy came up with 42 as basically a random num- number. Just, you know, uh, the author just pulled it out of a hat. And he's admitted so. He said, "Well, 42 just seemed like a just random number as any." Um, but in fact there's many numbers that are, uh, linked to 42. So, uh, 42, again, just, just to, um, summarize, is the answer that this super mega computer that had computed for a million years with the most powerful computer in the world had come up with, at some point, you know, the computer says, "Um, I have an answer." And they're like, "What?" (laughs) It's like, "You're not gonna like it." (laughs) And like, "What is it?" "It's 42." (laughs) And then the irony is that they had forgotten, of course, what the question was.

Lex Fridman 43:33 Yes. (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 43:34 (laughs) So now they have to build a bigger computer to figure out what the question was.

Lex Fridman 43:37 What the question is, yeah.

Manolis Kellis 43:37 To which the answer is 42. So as I was turning 42, I basically sort of researched, uh, why 42 is such a cool number. And it turns out that, uh ... And I, and I put together this little passage that I was explaining to all those, uh, guests to my, uh, 42nd birthday party while we were talking about the meaning of life. And, um, I basically talked about how 42 is the angle at which light reflects off of water to create a rainbow.

Lex Fridman 44:05 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 44:05 And it's so beautiful because the rainbow is basically the c- combination of sort of, it's been raining, but there's hope, 'cause the sun just came out.

Lex Fridman 44:13 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 44:13 So it's a very beautiful number there. So 42 is also the sum of all rows and columns of a magic cube that contains all consecutive in- integers starting at one. So basically if you, if you take all the integers between one and however many vertices there are, the sums is always 42.

Lex Fridman 44:29 Hm.

Manolis Kellis 44:30 42 is the only number left under 100 for which the equation of X to the cube plus Y to the cube plus Z to the cube is N, and was not known to not have a solution. And now, it's the, you know, it's the only one that actually has a solution. 42 is also 101010 in binary.

Lex Fridman 44:49 Hm.

Manolis Kellis 44:50 Again, the yin and the yang, the good and the evil, one and zero, the balance of the force. 42 is the number of chromosomes for the giant panda.

Lex Fridman 44:58 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 44:58 For the giant panda. (laughs) I know it's totally random.

Lex Fridman 45:02 Or is it?

Manolis Kellis 45:02 It's an auspicious symbol of great strength-

Lex Fridman 45:04 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 45:04 ... coupled with peace, friendship, gentle temperament, harmony, balance, and friendship. Whose black and white colors, again, symbolize yin and yang. The reason why it's the symbol for China is exactly the strength, but yet peace, and so on and so forth. So 42 chromosomes. It takes light 10-42 seconds to cross the diameter of a proton, connecting the two fundamental dimensions of space and time. 42 is the number of times a piece of paper should be folded to reach beyond the moon. (laughs) So, um, which is what I assume my students mean when they ask, uh, that their paper reaches for the stars, I just tell them, "Just fold it a bunch of times." (laughs)

Lex Fridman 45:47 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 45:48 Um, 42 is, uh, the number of Messier object 42, which is, uh, Orion, and that's, you know, uh, one of the most famous, um, galaxies. It's, uh, I think also the place where we can actually see the center of our galaxy. Uh, 42 is the numeric representation of the star symbol in ASCII.

Lex Fridman 46:07 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 46:08 Which is very useful when searching for the stars.

Lex Fridman 46:10 Right. Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 46:10 And also a regex for life, the universe, and everything. So star. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 46:17 (laughs) Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 46:17 In Egyptian mythology, the goddess Ma'at, which was personifying truth and justice would ask 42 questions to every dying person, and those answering successfully would become stars, continue to give life and fuel universal growth. In Judaic tradition, God ascribed, is ascribed a 42-lettered name, and trusted only to the middle-aged, pious, meek, free from bad temper, sober, and not insistent on his rights. Uh, and in Christian tradition, there's 42 generations from Abraham, Isaac, that we talked about, the story of Isaac, Jacob, eventually Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. In Kabbalistic tradition, Eloka, which is 42, is the number with which God creates the universe, starting with 25 letter B, and ending with 70 good, uh, so 25 plus, you know, uh, 17. There's this 42 chapter sutra, which is the first Indian religious scripture, which was translated to Chinese, thus introducing Buddhism to China from India. The 42-line Bible was the first printed book making the, mark- marking the age of printing in the 1450s, and the dissemination of knowledge eventually leading to the enlightenment. A yeast cell, which is a colest single cell eukaryote, and the subject of my PhD research has exactly 42 million proteins. Anyway, so, so there's a series of 42-

Lex Fridman 47:39 This is ... You're on fire with this.

Manolis Kellis 47:41 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 47:41 These are really good. So I guess what you're saying, it's just a random number. (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 47:45 Yeah, basically. (laughs) So, uh, all of these are backronyms. So, you know, after you have the number, you figure out why that number.

Lex Fridman 47:52 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 47:52 So anyway, so, uh, now that we've spoken about why 42, uh, why do we search for meaning?

Lex Fridman 47:57 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 47:58 And, uh, you're asking, you know, will that search ultimately lead to our destruction? And my f- my thinking is exactly the opposite. So basically that asking about meaning is something that's so inherent to human nature. It's something that makes life beautiful and that makes it worth living. And that searching for meaning is actually the point. It's not the finding it. I think when you found it, you're dead.

Lex Fridman 48:22 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 48:22 Don't, don't ever be satisfied that, you know, I've got it. So I like to say that life is lived forward, but it only makes sense backward. And I don't remember whose quote that is, but the, the, the whole search itself is the meaning. And what I love about it is that...There's a double search going on. There's a search in every one of us, through our own lives, to find meaning, and then there's a search which is happening for humanity itself, to find our meaning. And we, as humans, like to look at animals and say, "Of course they have a meaning." Like a dog has its meaning, it's just a bunch of instincts, you know, running around, loving everything. Um, you know, remember our joke with the cat and the dog? (laughs)

Lex Fridman 49:11 (laughs) Yeah. Cat has no meaning.

Manolis Kellis 49:13 In the sense where... (laughs)

Lex Fridman 49:13 (laughs) Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 49:14 No, no. So, so, um, and I- I'm noticing the yin yang symbol right here-

Lex Fridman 49:20 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 49:20 ...with this whole panda, black and white, and the zero one zero-

Lex Fridman 49:23 You were on fire with that 42.

Manolis Kellis 49:25 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 49:25 Some of those are gold. ASCII value for, uh, the star symbol.

Manolis Kellis 49:29 Oh.

Lex Fridman 49:29 Damn.

Manolis Kellis 49:30 Anyway. So, so, basically, in my view, the, the search for meaning and the act of, uh, searching for something more meaningful is life's meaning by itself. B- the fact that we kind of always hope that, yes, maybe for animals that's not the case, but maybe humans have something that we should be doing, and something else, and it's not just about procreation, it's not just about dominance, it's not just about strength and feeding, et cetera. Like, we're the one species that spends such a tiny little minority of its time feeding.

Lex Fridman 50:02 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 50:03 That we have this enormous, you know, huge cognitive capability that we can just use for all kinds of other stuff.

Lex Fridman 50:11 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 50:11 And that's where art comes in. That's where, you know, the healthy mind comes in with, you know, exploring all of these different aspects that are just not directly tied to, um, to a purpose, that's not directly tied to a function. It's really just the, the playing of life, the, you know, not, not for particular reason.

Lex Fridman 50:32 Do you think, uh, this thing we got, this, this mind is unique in the universe, in terms of how difficult it is to build?

Manolis Kellis 50:42 So-

Lex Fridman 50:43 Is it possible that we are the, the most beautiful thing that the universe has constructed?

Manolis Kellis 50:49 Yeah. Both the most beautiful and the most ugly, but certainly the most complex. So, look at evolutionary time. Uh, the dinosaurs ruled the earth for 135 million years. We've been around for a million years. (laughs) So, uh, one versus 135. So, dinosaurs were extinct, you know, about 60 million years ago, and mammals that had been happily evolving as tiny little creatures for 30 million years then took over the planet, and then, you know, dramatically radiated about 60 million years ago. Out of these mammals came the neocortex formation. So, basically, the neocortex, which is sort of the outer layer of our brain, compared to our "reptilian" brain, which we share the structure of with all of the dinosaurs, they didn't have that, and yet they ruled the planet.

Lex Fridman 51:35 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 51:36 So, how many other planets have still, you know, mindless dinosaurs, where strength was the only dimension, uh, ruling the planet? So, there was something weird that annihilated the dinosaurs. And again, you could look at biblical things of sort of God coming and wiping out his creatures and-

Lex Fridman 51:53 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 51:53 ... to make room for the next ones. So, um, the mammals basically sort of took over the planet, and then grew this cognitive capability of this general purpose machine. And primates pushed that to extreme, and humans, among primates, have just exploded that hardware.

Lex Fridman 52:15 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 52:15 But that hardware is selected for survival. It's selected for procreation. It's initially selected with this very simple Darwinian view of the world, of random mutation, ruthless selection, and then selection for making more of yourself. If you look at human cognition, it's gone down a weird evolutionary path.

Lex Fridman 52:43 Hm.

Manolis Kellis 52:43 In the sense that we are expending an enormous amount of energy on this apparatus between our ears, that is wasting, what, 15% of our bodily energy? 20%? Like some enormous percentage of our calories go to function our brain. No other species makes that big of a commitment. That has basically taken energetic changes for efficiency on the metabolic side, for humanity, to basically power that thing. And our brain is both enormously more efficient than other brains, but also, despite this efficiency, enormously more energy-consuming.

Lex Fridman 53:24 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 53:25 So, and if you look at just the sheer folds that the human brain has, again, our skull could only grow so much before it could no longer go through the pelvic opening and kill the mother at every birth. So, but yet the folds continued, effectively creating just so much more capacity. The evolutionary, uh, context in which this was made is enormously fascinating, and it has to do with other humans that we have now killed off or that have gone extinct, and that has now created this weird place of humans on the planet as the only species that has this enormous hardware. So, that can basically make us think that there's something very weird and unique that happened in human evolution, that perhaps has not been recreated elsewhere. Maybe the asteroid didn't hit, you know, sister Earth-

Lex Fridman 54:18 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 54:18 ... and dinosaurs are still ruling, and, you know, any kind of proto-human is squished and eaten for breakfast basically. Um, however, we're not as unique as we like to think, because there was this enormous diversity of other humanlike forms. And once you make it to that stage where you have a neocortex-like explosion of, wow, we're now competing on intelligence, and we're now competing on social structures, and we're now competing on larger and larger groups and being able to...... coordinate, and being able to have empathy. The concept of empathy, the concept of an ego, the concept of a self, of self-awareness, comes probably from being able to project another person's intentions to understand what they mean when you have these large cognitive groups, l- large social groups. So, me being able to sort of create a mental model of how you think may have come before I was able to create a, a personal mental model of how do I think. So this introspection probably came after this sort of projection, and this empathy, which basically means, you know, passion, pathos, suffering, (laughs) but basically sensing. So basically, empathy means feeling what you're feeling, trying to project your emotional state onto my cognitive apparatus. And I think that is what eventually led to this enormous cognitive explosion that happened in humanity. So, you know, life itself, in my view, is, uh, inevitable on every planet.

Lex Fridman 56:03 Inevitable?

Manolis Kellis 56:04 Inevitable. But the evolution of life to self-awareness and cognition, and all the incredible things that humans have done, you know, that might not be as inevitable.

Lex Fridman 56:14 That's your intuition. So,

Lex Fridman 56:16 uh, if you were to sort of, uh, estimate and bet some money on it, if we re-ran Earth a million times, uh, would what we got now be the most special thing? And how often would it be? So, scientifically speaking, uh, how repeatable is this experiment? (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 56:36 So, this whole cognitive revolution?

Lex Fridman 56:38 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 56:40 Hm. Maybe not. Maybe not. Basically, I feel that the longevity of, you know, dinosaurs suggests that it was not quite inevitable, that we, um, that we humans eventually, uh, made it.

Lex Fridman 56:56 Well, you're also implying one thing here. You're saying, you're implying that humans also don't have this longevity. Th- this is the interesting question. So with the Fermi paradox, the idea that the basic question is like, if, if the universe has a lot of, uh, alien life forms in it, why haven't we seen them?

Manolis Kellis 57:16 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 57:16 And one thought is that there's a great filter, or multiple great filters, that basically would destroy intelligent civilizations. Like, we, this thing that we, you know, this multi-folding brain that kee- keeps growing may not be such a big feature. It might be useful for survival, but it like, takes us, um, down a, uh, side road that is a very short one, with a quick dead end. What do you think about that?

Manolis Kellis 57:42 So, I think the universe is enormous, not just in space, but also in time. And the, the pretense that, you know, the last blink of an instant that we've been able to send radio waves is when somebody should've been paying attention to our planet, is a little ridiculous.

Lex Fridman 58:02 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 58:03 (laughs) So, my, my, you know, what I love about Star Wars-

Lex Fridman 58:06 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 58:07 ... is a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. It's not like some distant future, it's a long, long time ago. What I love about it is that basically says, you know, evolution and civilization are just so recent in, you know, on Earth. Like there's countless other planets that have probably all kinds of life forms, multi-cellular perhaps, and so on and so forth. Um, but the fact that humanity has only been listening and emitting for just this tiny little blink, means that any of these, you know, alien civilizations would need to be paying attention to every single insignificant planet out there. And, you know, again, I mean, the movie Contact and the, the book, is just so beautiful, this whole concept of we don't need to travel physically. We can travel as light. We can send instructions for people to create machines that will allow us to beam down light and recreate ourselves. And in the book, you know, the aliens actually take over. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 59:08 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 59:08 They're not as friendly. But, you know, this concept that we have to eventually go and conquer every planet, I mean, I, I think that yes, we will become a galactic species.

Lex Fridman 59:18 So you, you have a hope?

Manolis Kellis 59:20 Um ...

Lex Fridman 59:20 Well, you said think, so.

Manolis Kellis 59:21 Oh, oh, of course, of course.

Lex Fridman 59:23 Hope and-

Manolis Kellis 59:23 I mean, now that we've made it so far.

Lex Fridman 59:25 You, we, so you feel like we've made it?

Manolis Kellis 59:27 I ... Oh, gosh. I feel that, you know, cognition-

Lex Fridman 59:30 Have you heard-

Manolis Kellis 59:30 ... the cognition as an evolutionary trait, has won over in, in our planet. There's no doubt that we've made it. So basically humans have won the battle for, you know, uh, dominance. It wasn't necessarily the case with dinosaurs. Like, I mean, yes, you know, there's some claims of, uh, intelligence and if you look at Jurassic Park, yeah, sure, whatever.

Lex Fridman 59:53 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 59:53 Um, but, you know, they just don't have the hardware for it.

Lex Fridman 59:57 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 59:58 And humans have the hardware. There's no doubt that mammals have a dramatically improved hardware for cognition over dinosaurs. Like basically, there's universes where strength won out. And in our planet, in our, you know, particular version of whatever happened in this planet, cognition won out. And it's kind of cool. I mean, it's, it's a privilege, right?

Lex Fridman 1:00:20 But-

Manolis Kellis 1:00:20 It's kind of like living in Boston instead of, I don't know, uh, some, um, middle, uh, middle-aged, uh, place where everybody's like hitting each other with s- with, uh, you know, some, uh, weapons and sticks.

Lex Fridman 1:00:31 You're back to the Lucky One song. (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 1:00:33 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:00:33 Uh ...

Manolis Kellis 1:00:33 I mean, we are the lucky ones. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:00:36 ... I do. But the flip side of that, uh, is that this hardware also allows us to develop weapons and methods of destroying ourselves. Uh, so you, you-

Manolis Kellis 1:00:45 A- again, I wanna go back to Pinker-

Lex Fridman 1:00:47 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:00:48 ... and the better angels of our nature. The whole concept that-...civilization and the act of civilizing has dramatically reduced violence.

Lex Fridman 1:01:01 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:01:01 Dramatically. If you look, you know, at every scale, as soon as organization comes, the state basically owns the right to violence.

Lex Fridman 1:01:13 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 1:01:13 And eventually, the state gives that right of governance to the people. But, but violence has been eliminated by that state. So this whole concept of central governance and people agreeing to live together, and share responsibilities and duties and, you know, uh, all of that, is something that has led so much to less violence, less death, less suffering, less, you know, poverty, less, um, you know, war. I mean, yes, uh, we have the capability to destroy ourselves, but the arc of civilization has led to much, much less destruction, much, much less war, and much more peace. And of course, there's blips back and forth and, you know, there're setbacks, but again, the moral arc of the universe (laughs) -

Lex Fridman 1:02:10 But it's-

Manolis Kellis 1:02:10 ...seems to just-

Lex Fridman 1:02:11 ...I probably imagine there were two dinosaurs back in the day having this exact conversation, and they look up to the sky and there seems to be something like an asteroid, uh, going towards earth. So, it's, while it's, it's very true that the, the arc of our society of human civilization seems to be progressing towards a better, better life for everybody in the, in the many ways that you described, uh, things can change in a moment. And it feels like it's not just us humans who are living through a pandemic. You could imagine that, uh, a pandemic would be more destructive or, uh, or there could be asteroids that just appear out of the, the darkness of space, which I would, recently learned-

Manolis Kellis 1:02:56 Uh-huh.

Lex Fridman 1:02:56 ...is not that easy to, uh-

Manolis Kellis 1:02:58 Let me give you another number.

Lex Fridman 1:02:59 ...to detect them. Yes.

Manolis Kellis 1:03:00 So 48. What happens in 48 years?

Lex Fridman 1:03:04 I'm not sure.

Manolis Kellis 1:03:05 2068, Apophis.

Lex Fridman 1:03:07 Hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:03:07 There's an asteroid that's coming. In 48 years, it has a very high chance of actually wiping us out, completely (laughs) .

Lex Fridman 1:03:15 (laughs) Yes?

Manolis Kellis 1:03:15 Yes. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:03:15 It's bad news.

Manolis Kellis 1:03:15 So we have 48 y- 48 years to get our act together. It's not like some distant, distant hypothesis.

Lex Fridman 1:03:21 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 1:03:21 Like, yeah, sure, they're hard to detect, but this one we know about. It's coming. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:03:25 Yeah. So how do you feel about that? Why are you still so optimistic?

Manolis Kellis 1:03:27 Oh, gosh, I'm so happy with where we are now. This is gonna be great. Seriously, if you look at progress-

Lex Fridman 1:03:32 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 1:03:32 ...if you look at, again, the speed with which knowledge has been transferred, what, what has led to humanity making so many advances so fast? Okay. So, what has led humanity making so many advances is not just the hardware upgrades, it's also the software upgrades. So, by hardware upgrades, I basically mean our neocortex and the expansion and these layers and, you know, folds of our brain and all of that. That's the hardware. The software hasn't, uh, you know... The, the, the hardware hasn't changed much in the last, what, 70,000 years? As I mentioned last time, if you take a person from ancient Egypt and you bring them up now, they're just as equally fit.

Lex Fridman 1:04:17 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:04:18 So, hardware hasn't changed. What has changed is software. What has changed is that we are growing up in societies that are much more complex. This whole concept of neoteny basically allows our exponential growth. The concept that our brain has not fully formed, has not fully stabilized itself until after our teenage years. So we basically have a good 16 years, 18 years, to sort of infuse it with the latest and greatest in software. If you look at what happened in ancient Greece, why did everything explode at once? My take on this is that it was the shift from the Egyptian and hieroglyphic software to the Greek language software. This whole concept of creating abstract notions, of creating these, um, layers of cognition and layers of meaning and layers of abstraction for words and ideals and beauty and harmony. How do you write harmony in hieroglyphics? There's no such thing as, you know, sort of expressing these ideals of peace and justice and, you know, these concepts of... You know, or, or even, you know, uh, macabre concepts of doom, et cetera. Like, you don't, you don't have the language for it. Your brain has trouble getting at that concept. So what I'm trying to say is that these software upgrades for human language, human culture, human environment, human education, have basically led to this enormous explosion of knowledge, and eventually, after the Enlightenment, and as I was mentioning, the 42-line Bible, uh, and the printed press, the dissemination of knowledge, you basically now have this whole horizontal dispersion of ideas, in addition to the vertical inheritance of genes. So the hardware improvements happen through vertical inheritance. The software improvements happen th- through horizontal inheritance. And the reason why human civilization exploded is not a hardware change anymore. It's really a software change. So if you're looking at now where we are today, look at coronavirus. Yes, sure, it could have killed us. A hundred years ago, it would've. But it didn't. Why? Because in January, we p- we published a genome. A month later, less than a month later, the first vaccine designs were done. And now, less than a year later, 10 months later, we already have a working vaccine that's 90% efficient.I mean, that is ridiculous by any standards. And the reason is sharing. So, you know, the asteroid, yes, could wipe us out in 48 years, but 48 years? I mean, look at where we were 48 years ago, technologically. I mean, how much more we understand the basic foundations of space is enormous. The technological revolutions of digitization, the amount of compute power we can put on any, like, you know, b- n- nail size, you know, hardware is enormous. So, and this is nowhere near ending. You know, we all have our, like, little, you know, problems going back and forth on the social side.

Lex Fridman 1:07:45 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:07:45 And on the political side and on the cogni- and on the sort of human side, and the societal side. But science has not slowed down. Science is moving at a breakneck pace ahead. So, you know, Elon is now putting rockets out from the private space. I mean, that now democratization of space exploration is-

Lex Fridman 1:08:07 And you know-

Manolis Kellis 1:08:07 ... gonna revolutionize things.

Lex Fridman 1:08:07 ... it's gonna explode, continue.

Manolis Kellis 1:08:09 Of course. In the same way that every technology has exploded, this is the shift to space technology exploding. So 48 years is infinity from now, in terms of space capabilities. So I'm not worried

Manolis Kellis 1:08:22 at all.

Lex Fridman 1:08:22 Are you excited by the possibility of a human s- well, one, the human stepping foot on Mars? And two, possible colonization of, not necessarily Mars, but other planets and all that kind of stuff for people living in space?

Manolis Kellis 1:08:36 Inevitable.

Lex Fridman 1:08:37 Inevitable.

Manolis Kellis 1:08:37 Inevitable.

Lex Fridman 1:08:38 Would you do it?

Manolis Kellis 1:08:39 Of course.

Lex Fridman 1:08:39 Or are you kind of like Earth?

Manolis Kellis 1:08:40 Of course.

Lex Fridman 1:08:40 Wait. (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 1:08:41 In a heartbeat. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:08:41 How many, how many people will you wait? Will you wait for, I think it was about when the, the D- the Declaration of Ind- Independence was signed is about two to three million people lived here. So would you move, like, before? Would you be, like, uh, on the first boat? Would you be on the 10th boat? Would you wait until the Declaration of Independence?

Manolis Kellis 1:09:00 I don't think I'll be on the short list because I'll be old by then. They'll probably get a bunch of younger people.

Lex Fridman 1:09:06 But you're ... It's the ...

Manolis Kellis 1:09:07 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:09:08 (laughs) It's the wisdom and the, uh, the ... But w- then again you are the lucky one.

Manolis Kellis 1:09:12 But wisdom can be transferred horizontally.

Lex Fridman 1:09:13 You, I, I gotta tell you, you are the lucky one so you might be on the list. I don't know.

Manolis Kellis 1:09:16 I, I mean, I-

Lex Fridman 1:09:17 You never know.

Manolis Kellis 1:09:17 ... I, I kind of feel like I would love to see Earth from above, just to watch our planet. I mean, just, I mean, you know you can watch a live feed of the, uh, space station. Watching Earth is magnificent, like this blue, tiny little shield. It's so thin, our atmosphere. Like, if you drive to New York, you're basically in outer space. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's just so thin. And it's just, again, such a privilege to be on this planet. Such a privilege. But I think our species is in for big, good things. (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:09:54 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 1:09:54 I think that, uh, you know, we will overcome our little problems and eventually come together as a species. I feel that we've, we've, we're definitely on the path to that. And, you know, it's n- just not permeated through the whole universe yet, I mean, through the whole world yet, through the whole Earth yet, but it's definitely permeating.

Lex Fridman 1:10:15 So you've talked about humans as special. How exactly are we special relative to the dinosaurs?

Manolis Kellis 1:10:24 So I mentioned that there's, um, you know, this dramatic cognitive improvement that we've made. But I think it goes much deeper than that. So if you look at a lion attacking a gazelle in the middle of the Serengeti. The lion is smelling the molecules in the environment. Its, uh, hormones and neuroreceptors are sort of getting it ready for impulse.

Lex Fridman 1:10:53 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:10:54 The target is constantly looking around and sensing. I've actually been in Kenya-

Lex Fridman 1:11:00 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 1:11:00 ... and I've kind of seen the hunt.

Lex Fridman 1:11:03 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 1:11:03 So I've kind of seen the sort of game of waiting. And the mitochondria in the muscles of the lion are basically ready for, you know, jumping.

Lex Fridman 1:11:18 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:11:18 They're expensing an enormous amount of energy. The grass, as it's flowing, is constantly transforming solar energy into chloroplasts, you know, through the chloroplast into energy, which eventually feeds the gazelle and eventually feeds the lions and so on and so forth. So as humans, we experience all of that. But the lion only experiences one layer. The mitochondria in its body are only experiencing one layer. The chloroplasts are only experiencing one layer. The, you know, photoreceptors and the smell receptors and the chemical receptors, like the lion always attacks against the wind, so that it's not smelled. Like, all of these things are one layer at a time. And we humans somehow perceive the whole stack. So going back to software infrastructure and hardware infrastructure, if you design a computer, you basically have a physical layer that you start with, and then on top of that physical layer, you have, you know, the electrical layer, and on top of the electrical layer, you have basically gates and logic and an assembly layer, and on top of the assembly layer, you have your, you know, higher order, higher level programming, and on top of that, you have your deep learning r- routine, et cetera. And on top of that, you eventually build a cognitive system, uh, that's smart. I want you to now picture this cognitive system becoming not just self-aware, but also becoming aware of the hardware that it's made of, and the atoms that they're, that it's made of and so on and so forth. So it's as if your AI system, and there's this beautiful scene in, um...... uh, 2001: Odyssey of Space, where, where, uh, HAL-

Lex Fridman 1:13:10 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:13:10 ... after, uh, Dave starts disconnecting him-

Lex Fridman 1:13:12 Yes.

Manolis Kellis 1:13:13 ... is starting to sing a song about daisies, et cetera. And HAL is basically saying, "Dave, I'm losing my mind. I can feel I'm losing my mind."

Lex Fridman 1:13:26 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:13:26 It's just so beautiful. This concept of self-awareness-

Lex Fridman 1:13:30 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:13:30 ... of knowing that the hardware is no longer there, is amazing. And in the same way, humans who have had accidents are aware that they've had accidents. So there's this self-awareness of AI, uh, that, um, is, you know, this beautiful concept about, you know, sort of the eventual cognitive leap to self-awareness. But imagine now the AI system actually breaking through these layers and saying, "Wait a minute, I think I can design a slightly better hardware to get me functioning better." And that's what basically humans are doing. So if you, if you look at our reasoning layer, it's built on top of a cognitive layer. And the reasoning layer we share with AI. It's kind of cool.

Lex Fridman 1:14:14 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:14:14 Like, there is another thing on the planet that can integrate equations-

Lex Fridman 1:14:17 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:14:18 ... and it's manmade. But we share computation with them. We share this cognitive layer of playing chess. We're not alone anymore. We're not the only thing on the planet that plays chess. Now we have AI that also plays chess.

Lex Fridman 1:14:31 But in some sense that, that particular organism, AI as it is now, only operates in that layer.

Manolis Kellis 1:14:36 Exactly. Exactly. And then most animals operate in the sort of cognitive layer that we're all experiencing. A bat is doing this incredible integration of signals, but it's not aware of it. It's basically constantly sending echolocation waves, and it's receiving them back. And multiple bats in the same cave are operating at slightly different frequencies and with slightly different pulses. And they're all sensing objects and they're doing motion planning in their cognitive hardware. But they're not even aware of all of that.

Lex Fridman 1:15:10 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:15:10 All they know is that they have a 3D view of space around them, just like any gazelle walking through, you know, the desert, and any, um, baby looking around is aware of things without doing the math of, "How am I processing all of this visual information," et cetera. We are just aware of the layer that you live in. I think if you look at this, uh, uh, at humanity, we've basically managed through our cognitive layer, through our perception layer, through our senses layer, through our multi-organ layer, through our genetic layer, through our molecular layer, through our atomic layer-

Lex Fridman 1:15:51 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:15:52 ... through our quantum layer, through even the very fabric of the spacetime continuum, unite all of that cognitively. So as we're watching that scene in the Serengeti, we as scientists, we as educated humans, we as, you know, anyone who's finished high school, are aware of all of this beauty, of all of these different layers interplaying together. And I think that's something very unique in perhaps not just the galaxy, but maybe even the cosmos. This species that has managed to, in space, cross through these layers from the enormous to the infinitely small. And that's what I love about particle physics.

Lex Fridman 1:16:33 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:16:33 The fact that it actually unites everything.

Lex Fridman 1:16:35 The very small and the very big.

Manolis Kellis 1:16:36 The very small and the very big.

Lex Fridman 1:16:38 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:16:38 It's only through the very big that the sm- very small gets formed.

Lex Fridman 1:16:41 Right.

Manolis Kellis 1:16:41 Like basically every atom of gold results from the fusion that happened of, you know, increasingly large particles before that explosion that then disperses it through the cosmos. And it's only through understanding the very large that we understand the very small and vice versa. And that's in space. Then there's the time-

Lex Fridman 1:17:03 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:17:03 ... direction. As you are watching the Kilimanjaro mountain, you can kind of look back through time-

Lex Fridman 1:17:11 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:17:11 ... to when that volcano was exploding and, you know, growing out of the tectonic forces. As you drive through Death Valley, you see these mountains on their side and these layers of history exposed. We are aware of the eons that have happened on Earth and the tectonic movements on Earth, the same way that we're aware of the Big Bang and the, you know, early evolution of the cosmos. And we can also see forward in time as to where the universe is heading. We can see, you know, Apophis in 2068 coming over.

Lex Fridman 1:17:53 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 1:17:53 Looking ahead in time, I mean, that would be magician stuff, you know, in ancient times. So what I love about humanity and its role in the universe is that, you know, if there's a god watching, he's like, "Finally, somebody figured it out."

Lex Fridman 1:18:07 (laughs)

Manolis Kellis 1:18:08 "I've been building all these beautiful things and somebody can appreciate them."

Lex Fridman 1:18:11 And figured me out-

Manolis Kellis 1:18:12 (laughs)

Lex Fridman 1:18:12 ... from a god's perspective, meaning, like, become aware of-

Manolis Kellis 1:18:15 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:18:15 ... you know-

Manolis Kellis 1:18:16 Yeah.

Lex Fridman 1:18:17 ... yeah. So it's kind of interesting, so, to think of the world in this way as layers and us humans are able to what, convert those layers into ideas that they, you can then, like, combine, right? So we're, we're doing some kind of conversion-

Manolis Kellis 1:18:32 Exactly. Exactly.

Lex Fridman 1:18:33 ... uh.

Manolis Kellis 1:18:33 And last time you asked me about whether we live in a simulation, for example.

Lex Fridman 1:18:37 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:18:39 I mean, realize that we are living in a simulation. We are. The reality that we're in, without any sort of pro- person programming this, is a simulation. Like, basically what happens inside your skull, there's this integration of sensory inputs which are translated into perceptory signals, which are then translated into a conceptual model of the world around you. And that exercise is happening seamlessly, and yet-You know, if you, if you think about sort of, again, this whole simulation and Neo, um, analogy, you can think of the reality that we live in as a matrix, as the matrix, but we've actually broken through the matrix. We've actually traversed the layers. We didn't have to take a pill. Like, we didn't make-

Lex Fridman 1:19:27 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:19:27 ... you know, Morpheus didn't have to show up to basically give us the blue pill or the red pill. We were able to sufficiently evolve cognitively through the hardware explosion and sufficiently evolve scientifically through the software explosion to basically get at breaking through the matrix, realizing that we live in a matrix and realizing that we are this thing in there, and yet that thing in there has a consciousness that lives through all these layers. And I think we're the only species, we are the only thing that we even can think of that has actually done that, has sort of permeated space and time scales and layers of abstraction, plowing through them-

Lex Fridman 1:20:13 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:20:13 ... and realizing what we're really, really made of. And the next frontier is of course cognition. So we understand so much of the cosmos, so much of the stuff around us, but the stuff inside here, finding the basis for the soul, finding the basis for the ego, for the self, the self-awareness. When do-- when does the spark happen that basically sort of makes you you? I mean, that's, you know, really the next frontier. So, so in terms of these peeling off layers of complexity, somewhere between the cognitive layer and the, um, reasoning layer or the computational layer, there's still some stuff to be figured out there.

Lex Fridman 1:20:54 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:20:54 And I think that's the final frontier of sort of completing our, our journey through that matrix.

Lex Fridman 1:20:59 And maybe duplicating it into, in other versions of ourselves through AI, which is another ex- very exciting, uh,

Lex Fridman 1:21:08 possibility.

Manolis Kellis 1:21:08 What I love about AI and the way that it operates right now is the fact that it is unpredictable. There's emergent behavior in our cognitively capable artificial systems that we can certainly model, but we don't encode directly. And that's a, a key difference. So we like to say, "Oh, pfft, of course this is not really intelligent because we coded it up."

Lex Fridman 1:21:38 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:21:38 "And we've just put in these little parameters there and there's like s- you know, uh, 6 billion parameters and once you've learned them, you know, we kind of understand the layers." But that's an oversimplification. It's, it's like saying, "Oh, of course, pfft, humans. We understand humans. They're just made out of neurons and, you know, layers of cortex and there's a visual, uh, area and there's a..." But, but every human is encoded by a ridiculously small number of genes compared to the complexity of our cognitive apparatus. 20,000 genes is really not that much, out of which a tiny little fraction are in fact encoding all of our cognitive functions. The rest is emergent behavior.

Lex Fridman 1:22:19 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:22:19 The rest is the, you know, the, the, the cortical layers doing their thing.

Lex Fridman 1:22:26 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:22:26 In the same way that when we build, you know, these conversational systems or these cognitive systems or these deep learning systems, we put the architecture in place, but then they do their thing. And in some ways, that's creating something that has its own identity, that's creating something that's not just, oh yeah, it's not the, the early AI where if you hadn't programmed what happens in the grocery bags when you have both cold and hot and hard and soft, you know, the system wouldn't know what to do. No. No. You basically now just program the primitives and then it e- learns from that.

Lex Fridman 1:22:59 So even though the origins are humble, just like it is for our genetic code, uh, for AI, even though the origins are humble, the, the, uh, the, the result of it being deployed into the world is infinitely complex. And that's... (sighs) And yet there's not, uh, it's not yet able to be cognizant of all the other layers in, uh, uh, of its... you know, it's not a, uh, it's not able to think about, uh, space and time. It's not able to think about the hardware on which it runs, the electricity on which it runs yet.

Manolis Kellis 1:23:38 So, so if you look at humans, we basically have the same cognitive architecture as monkeys, as the great apes. It's just a ton more of it.

Lex Fridman 1:23:48 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:23:49 If you look at, um, GPT-3-

Lex Fridman 1:23:51 Mm-hmm.

Manolis Kellis 1:23:51 ... versus GPT-2, again, it's the same architecture, just more of it, and yet it's able to do so much more.

Lex Fridman 1:23:58 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:23:59 So if you start thinking about sort of what's the future of that, GPT-4 and GPT-5, do you really need fundamentally different architectures or do you just need a ton more hardware? And we do have a ton more hardware. Like these systems are nowhere near what humans have between our ears. So, uh, you know, there's something to be said about stay tuned for emergent behavior. We keep thinking that general intelligence might just be forever away, but it could just simply be that we just need a ton more hardware and that humans are just not that different from the great apes except for just a ton more of it.

Lex Fridman 1:24:38 Yeah. It's, it's interesting that in the AI community, maybe there's a human-centric fear, but the notion that GPT-10 will be, uh, will achieve general intelligence is something that people shy away from, that there has to be something totally different and new added to this. And yet it's not seriously considered that, um, this, this very simple thing, this very simple architecture when scaled might be the thing that achieves superintelligence.

Manolis Kellis 1:25:09 And people think the same way about humanity and human consciousness. They're like, "Oh, consciousness might be quantum or it might be, you know, some, some-"

Lex Fridman 1:25:17 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:25:17 "... non-physical thing."

Lex Fridman 1:25:18 Yeah.

Manolis Kellis 1:25:18 And it's like...Or it could just be a lot more of the same hardware that now is sufficiently capable of self-awareness, just because it has the neurons to do it. So maybe the consciousness that is so elusive is an emergent behavior of you basically string together all these cognitive capabilities that come from running, from seeing, from reacting, from predicting the movement of a fly as you're catching it through the air. All of these things are just like great lookup tables encoded in a giant neural network. I mean, I'm oversimplifying, of course. The complexity and the diversity of the different types of excitatory and inhibitory neurons, the waveforms that sort of shine through the, you know, the, the, the connections across all those different layers, the amalgamation of signals, etc. The brain is enormously complex. I, I mean, of course. But again, it's a small number of primitives encoded by a tiny number of genes, which are self-organized and shaped by their environment. Babies that are growing up today are listening to language from conception. Basically, as soon as the auditory apparatus forms, it's already getting shaped to the types of signals that are out in the real world today. So it's not just like, oh, have an Egyptian be born and then ship them over. It's like, no, that, that Egyptian would be listening in to the complexity of the world and then getting born and sort of seeing just how much more complex the world is. So it's a combination of the underlying hardware, which if you think about, as a geneticist, in my view, the hardware gives you an upper bound of cognitive capabilities, but it's the environment that makes those c-capabilities shine and reach their maximum. So we're a combination of nature and nurture. The nature is our genes and our cognitive apparatus, and the nurture is the richness of the environment that makes that cognitive apparatus reach its potential. And we are so far from reaching our full potential. So far. I think that kids being born 100 years from now, they'll be looking at, at us now and saying, "What primitive educational systems they had. I can't believe people were not wired into this-"

Lex Fridman 1:27:39 (laughs) .

Manolis Kellis 1:27:39 "... you know, virtual reality from birth as we are now, 'cause like they're clearly inferior," and so on and so forth. So I, I, basically, I think that our environment will continue exploding and our cognitive capabilities, it's not like, "Oh, we're only using 10% of our brain." That's ridiculous. Of course, we're using 100% of our brain. But it's still constrained by how complex our environment is.

Lex Fridman 1:28:02 So the hardware will remain the same, but the software e- in a quickly advancing environment, the software will make a huge difference in the nature of like the human experience, the human condition. It's fascinating to think that humans will look very different 100 years from now, just because the environment changed, even though we're still the same great apes, the, the descendant of apes.

Lex Fridman 1:28:25 At the core of this is kind of a notion of ideas that, uh, I don't know if you're... There's a lot of people that's including you, eloquently, about this topic, but Richard Dawkins talks about, uh, the notion of memes, and let's say this notion of ideas, uh, uh, you know, multiplying, selecting in the minds of humans. Do you ever think from, about ideas from the, from that perspective, ideas as, as organisms themselves that are bre- breeding in the minds of humans?

Manolis Kellis 1:28:57 I love the concept of memes. I love the concept of these horizontal transfer of ideas and sort of permeating through, through, you know, our layer of interconnected neural networks. So you can think of sort of the cognitive space that has now connected all of humanity, where we are now one giant information and idea sharing network, well beyond what was thought to be ever capable when the concept of a meme was created by Richard Dawkins. So, but I wanna take that